Hello and welcome to the newest episode of YouTube’s favorite game show: How!
Many!
Words!
Will!
Sam!
Mispronounce!!
Today: one narrator, 33 Japanese words, and thousands of commenters just waiting to pounce.
Let’s get started.
So, this is Japan.
And this is Tokyo.
And this is also Tokyo, which is kind of odd because this and this are about this far apart.
This is kind of odd, of course, because as you may know from living in a place, places
are typically in one general place, and not several very far apart places.
So, what’s going on here?
Well, in order to understand why Tokyo includes islands 700 miles or 1,200 kilometers away,
you first have to understand the Japanese prefecture system.
Not to go all History of Japan on you, but back a long time ago, Japan was divided into
a ton of what were called hans, essentially fiefdoms that were the property of feudal
samurai lords called daimyo.
But then in 1871 the Meiji government was all like “hey, you know how everything is
run by super-cool warlord samurais?
Well, what if instead it was run by lame weak nerds?”
So, they switched over to what we call the prefecture system, splitting Japan into 47
regions that serve as the first level of administrative division.
Now, one interesting thing about the prefecture system is that Japanese people don’t call
it the prefecture system.
And I know what you’re thinking: “Well yeah, obviously they don’t call it the prefecture
system; they don’t call the country Japan, either.
They speak another language, idiot.”
But while I may be an idiot, that’s actually not the point I’m making; Japan doesn’t
call them prefectures because they don’t exactly have a word for prefectures.
Instead, they have four words for them.
Of the 47 prefectures, 43 are ken, “prefectures proper,” two are fu, “urban prefectures,”
one is do, a “circuit prefecture,” and one is to, a “metropolis,” which is Tokyo.
This system is sometimes collectively referred to as the todofuken system, because, you know,
to, do, fu, and ken.
It’s some top-grade lazy naming; it would be like if Americans called the federal government
SupremeCourtCongressJoeBiden or named a band Crosby Stills Nash and Young.
Prefectures are further split up into municipalities, which also come in four forms: cho, which
means towns; mura, villages; shi, cities; and ku, the special wards of Tokyo, which
formerly made up Tokyo City.
Prefectures and municipalities have extremely similar governing structures: prefectures
have a governor, municipalities have a mayor, and both have councils, all of whom are directly
elected to a four year term.
There’s not a real formal delineation of powers between the prefectures and municipalities––they
kind of share most responsibilities––but together, they run essentially all elements
of domestic life in Japan apart from diplomacy, national security, and trials: schools, police
forces, roads, weird little mascots, et cetera.
In fact, local government accounts for 70% of government spending in Japan, while the
remaining 30% goes to defending the island from its legendary, monstrous enemy: white
guys who are way too into anime.
So now let’s do what Half as Interesting does best and talk about some tiny islands.
These are the Bonin, or Ogasawara Islands.
They consist of all these islands, but the only inhabited ones are these ones: Chichijima
and Hahajima.
They were first visited by Europeans in 1543, then visited by the Japanese in 1670, then
claimed by the Brits in 1827, then claimed by the Japanese in 1862, but then the Japanese
gave up on that a year later, but then twelve years later they gave up on giving up and
claimed them again, and put settlers on them and told all the European and American settlers
who were already there that they were Japanese now, creating the world’s first weeaboos.
And these are the Izu Islands, commonly called the Seven Islands of Izu, because of course,
there are seventeen islands and nine of them are inhabited.
The Izu are basically Australia but smaller: the Japanese used them as convict settlements
until about the middle of the Edo period, and now they’re a popular tourist destination
thanks to their scenic beauty, ecological diversity, and propensity to try and murder
you.
So basically, here’s the deal: Japan has all these islands, and they’ve got to administer
them somehow, but they don’t want to make them their own prefecture, because only a
handful of people live there.
So they became part of Tokyo’s prefecture, Tokyo Metropolis, because, well, Tokyo has
a lot of money, it’s the capital, it’s on the water, and it has a major port for
travel between the mainland and the islands.
In fact, the only way to visit the Ogasawara islands is a weekly 24-hour ferry ride from
Tokyo.
Ultimately, the key to understanding why Tokyo includes these far-off islands is despite
the fact that most foreigners think of Tokyo as a city, the same way we’d think of London
or Chicago or Flavortown, it’s not a city––it’s a prefecture.
Because the islands are so far away, Tokyo has actually categorized them into four subprefectures,
a relatively unusual form of sub-government in Japan that includes regional offices to
help add more structure on top of municipalities.
The Izu islands are divided into the Oshima subprefecture, the Miyake subprefecture, and
the Hacijo subprefecture, and the Ogasawara Islands are all one subprefecture: the Ogasawara
Islands, and a handful of further-out islands that historically weren’t considered part
of the Ogasawara islands, the Volcano Islands, Nishinoshima, Minamitorishima, and Okinotorishima,
which are maybe islands or maybe a cold-hearted ploy at expanding Japan’s EEZ.
It’s actually a fascinating story––if only someone had made an easily digestible,
well-researched, humor-filled video on that topic… oh wait someone did.
This system can lead to some weird consequences, though.
For example, Tokyo’s population density is technically listed as 6,363 people per
square kilometer, but that number is bigly skewed by the islands, which have a lot of
area and a not lot of people: if you just considered mainland Tokyo, its population
density would be about 7,780 per square kilometer.
Another challenge is that the governor of Tokyo prefecture has to be voted on by everyone
in Tokyo, which means that the mayor of all this can’t be officially declared until
ballots come in from here.
Yet another difficulty is that our data suggests that less than half of the residents of the
Tokyo Islands are subscribed to Nebula.
Look, by now you’ve probably heard the spiel before––Nebula is home to an incredible
amount of Original and ad-free content from all your favorite educational creators: me,
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